The best thing I saw last week was Dads the new Fox show starring Giovanni Ribisi and Seth Green, from the creators of Ted and Family Guy, namely Seth MacFarlane. I watched the 2 episodes on the Fox.com website and found it really enjoyable. Green and Ribisi are in situations where they are both stuck living with their out of date slightly burdensome dads, basically a sitcom premise.
I wanted to write this article specifically to address some of the ridiculous reviews I saw for this show. Critics, bloggers, others with opinions have been complaining that the show is sexist, racist, and blah, blah, blah. Notice that I mentioned right off the top that the show is from the creators of Ted and Family Guy, one of the producers is Seth MacFarlane, which should give you a really good idea about the humor level involved in this show. It’s a sitcom, it’s a funny sitcom premise, the characters get roped into ridiculous scenarios that only happen in far-fetched sitcom worlds.
And it’s funny! This might be the best funny acting I’ve seen from Ribisi since his role as Pheobe’s mentally eccentric younger brother on Friends. Green in the 2 episodes I saw carries a fair bit of the show and does it with panache. Mull and Riegert play very different dads with weird quirks and annoying strange habits, as they should in a sitcom.
In this ridiculously over sensitive politically correct world it seems that no one is allowed to enjoy a show when any of the jokes make fun of any one. It’s just sad, people are complaining about this show for ridiculous reasons. Jokes are made at the expense of peoples sex, race, ethnic backgrounds, relationships, ability to dress as a school girl and giggle, basically all things that sitcoms have been doing for the past 40 years. It also makes me wonder why there were people that attacked this show but no one gave this show credit for having multi-ethnic cast filled with great female actors. Vanessa Lachey and Brenda Song are both great on the show and Tonita Castro is amazing!
This is a show written for a new generation of adults dealing with parents moving back in and making fun of the situation because comedy is one of our greatest coping mechanisms. It’s fairly well written, it’s got some great sarcastic jokes, the crew seems to be having fun making the show and I found it really entertaining.
Give it a watch, give it a chance, and decide for yourself. And if you find that it’s not the show for you, that’s fine, but don’t feel the need to get offended and bring your bile to the internet. Remember, no matter what you are watching your shows on there is a button, or a dial, or a tab, something, that will let you change the channel. Now I’m not saying that well written criticism is bad, but just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that it needs to be labeled as racist or sexist or any other ist, maybe it’s just not the show for you. It’s just a sitcom people, not the end of the world. Go find the stuff you like, quit wasting your energy telling us all about the stuff you don’t.
